Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

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I've done this for years but... recently killed most of it.

Remembering when I've put a custom email (amazon@mydomain) vs a plus (me+amazon@mydomain) not to mention remebering both that I've used something fancy and, how exactly I customized it has just caused a bunch of headaches. I have warranty purchases across multiple email addresses for sites, figuring out what to type into the "forgot my password" box is a pain...

I even have a Steam login that I can't for the life of me recall how to get into. I only know the username, but I don't know how to request the reset email associated with it. None of my guesses have worked. So ... I just made another Steam account.

... and ironically the email address I give to close friends is the one that's all over haveibeenpwned.com.

/facepalm

My password manager usually remembers which address I use on which site, and otherwise I can quickly look it up in my email archive. For the most important accounts (ISP etc.) I write the credentials down separately. I always used consistent patterns for mapping domain/service names to localparts, so normally I can also guess right on the first try.

The issue I have is not remembering them, as the password manager does that. The issue is more when companies rely on your email address being the same for different parts of the service or they take my PayPal email address and use that as my email address.

One of the most annoying is when contacting customer support by email and they reject andy@ at and now I have to find a way to send an email to them from ocado@ or whatever email address I chose.

The PayPal problem can generally be prevented by registering an account first, i.e. don’t use guest checkout.

I use an email client that lets me specify an arbitrary From address, and also that automatically derives the From address either from the recipient of the message or from the To of the message being replied to, so it generally fills in the correct From address by default.

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